“How was your day?” Mom asked, smoothing out the napkin on her lap repeatedly.
Dad blinked, as if the question had woken him up, then shook his head. “Same old, same old,” he said. “Martin was an asshole. Nothing new there.” Martin was Dad’s boss.
Warily I glanced at Susannah over my last few forkfuls of peas. My father had also begun cursing more freely once he’d come home from Iraq, and Susannah’s reactions to that ranged from feigned indifference to puritanical disdain. Susannah, however, wasn’t paying attention to Dad. Instead, she was glaring at me as if she hoped the force of her gaze would bore a hole through my head. Then Mom got up to fix Dad a plate of pork chops, and we finished our dinner in a strained but familiar silence.
I WAS READING in bed—To Kill a Mockingbird, which I enjoyed, even though it was assigned reading for eighth grade and for some stupid reason you were supposed to hate whatever you had to read for school—when Mom came and stood in the doorway of my room. She was just outside the circle of weak light cast by my bedside lamp, but even then I could see the weariness in her face. Mom was an attractive woman—fair-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed, all traits I had inherited from her, minus the attractive part—and she had always been slim, but lately she had begun to look tired, worn out.
I closed the book on my finger to hold my place.
Mom crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe. “Can you do me a favor and take it easy on your sister?” she asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Honestly, Mom,” I said.
“I know she can be a pain,” she said. “And I know it must be hard having a little sister. But she’s your little sister, Ethan. She’s the only one you’ve got.”
Looking at my mother in my doorway, a soft smile on her tired face, I knew that I couldn’t say no to her, that I was bound to carry the cross of the elder brother. I managed a sigh. “Lady, you are the cruelest she alive,” I said.
Mom squinted in thought. “Macbeth?” she said.
“Twelfth Night,” I said.
Mom’s eyebrows rose.
“What?” I said.
“You’re quoting comedies now,” she said. “There might be hope for you yet. Even if you called me cruel.”
“It was a joke,” I said.
She walked over to my bed. “You’re a good son,” she said. “And a good brother.”
“Whatever,” I mumbled.
She leaned over and kissed me on the top of the head. “I love—”
The doorbell rang, followed by a frantic knocking on the front door. My mother drew back and we looked at each other. It was after nine o’clock, and Mom clearly wasn’t expecting company.
“Alanna?” my father called from down the hall.
“I’m in Ethan’s room,” my mother called back, turning for the doorway.
More knocking, and then the doorbell rang, then again, a frantic pealing like an alarm. I heard my father headed for the front door.
“Jimmy?” my mother called, and she walked out of my room.
I went to my window and looked out the blinds at our front yard. We lived in an old ranch house in a section of Sandy Springs sandwiched between I-285 and Hammond Drive, a major east-west road connecting shopping districts in suburban Atlanta. Driving out of our neighborhood usually necessitated waiting for a break in the long line of cars driving to or from Perimeter Mall, but our cul-de-sac was two blocks from Hammond and got hardly any traffic. So when I looked out the window, I wasn’t surprised to see that there were no cars on the street. I couldn’t see our front porch from my window—the angle was wrong—but there was something white and shiny on the front walk. It was a shoe, some kind of glittering woman’s sandal. It looked like nothing that either my mother or sister would wear.
The front door opened and I heard my father talking, followed by a low wail. It sounded like a girl’s voice. Was Susannah awake? I glanced at the closed door to the Jack-and-Jill bathroom we shared, but no light showed below the door. Quietly I stepped into the hallway. Now I could hear my mother; she and my father were apparently both in the foyer with whoever had been at the front door.
“—for God’s sake,” my mother said.
“Are you hurt?” my father asked. “Can you tell me—”
“Please.” This was the new voice, a girl, pleading. “He wants to hurt me. I need help; please help me.”
I crept down the hallway, then froze as Susannah’s door opened. She stood there, her hair rumpled with sleep. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Shh,” I said with a cutting-off motion. “Go back to bed.”
“Stop telling me what to do.” She looked down the hall. “Is someone here?”
I waved her off, trying to hear my parents, whose voices had lowered to a murmuring. All I could hear was my mother saying “police,” and then the girl wailing again—“No, not the police, please.”
“Who is that?” Susannah said.
I turned on her. “Shut up,” I hissed.
Then my parents walked past the end of the hallway, a third person between them. Not a girl but a young woman. She was shorter than both my parents, with her head bowed as she cried, stringy blonde hair hiding her face. She wore some sort of silvery sequined top and jeans. I also saw she was barefoot. Then they passed beyond my range of vision into the family room at the back of the house. The woman was sobbing now, a low, desperate sound of someone breaking inside, piece by jagged piece.
That’s her shoe outside, I thought. It must have fallen off her foot as she ran up our front walk. I needed to tell Mom, maybe get the shoe myself. It seemed important
